Uploaded 30 June 2000

When Theodor Adorno happened to see one of Robert Aldrich’s episodes of Four Star Playhouse (USA 1952-1956) about Willy Dante, gambler/club owner in the lineage of Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca, he was not aware that he was watching a film by Robert Aldrich, or even that he was watching an early example of what is now called television noir, although the description in Whatever happened to Robert Aldrich? of Aldrich’s episodes of the series (which would have been called Dante’s Inferno had it clicked as a spin-off) makes it clear that the generalized atmosphere of crime Adorno saw in this modest tv effort – the guy with the hat, the girl with too much makeup – included stylistic traits – deep focus, noir lighting, long takes – that were already the style of Kiss Me Deadly (USA 1955) in embryo:

When a television sketch is called “Dante’s Inferno,” and when the first scene takes place in a nightclub of the same name, where a man with his hat on sits at the bar and at some distance from him a woman with sunken eyes, too much make-up, and her legs crossed high orders herself another double cocktail, then the habitual television viewer knows that he can look forward to a murder. If he knew nothing more than the title “Dante’s Inferno”, perhaps he could be surprised, but he sees the show in the schema of “crime drama”, where care is taken to insure that horrible acts of violence will occur. The woman perched on the barstool presumably will not be the principal criminal, but she will end up paying for her degage lifestyle; the hero, who has not even appeared yet, will be rescued from a situation all human reason could conclude is hopeless. Certainly experienced viewers will not translate such shows directedly into everyday life, but they are encouraged to construe their experiences just as rigidly and mechanically. They learn that crime is normal. What also contributes to this is the fact that the dimestore romanticism of heinous deeds shrouded in mystery is connected with the pedantic imitation of all the accessories of real life. If one of the characters were merely to dial a telephone number different from the one usually used in the series, then the station would receive indignant letters from the audience, who is ready to complacently entertain the fiction that a murderer is lurking on every corner. The pseudo-realism provided by the schema infuses empirical life with a false meaning, the duplicity of which viewers can scarcely see through because the nightclub looks exactly like the ones they know. Even chance, ostensibly untouched by the schema, bears its mark, for it is conceived under the abstract category “the accidental nature of everyday life”; nothing sounds more false than when television pretends to let people speak the way they usually do. [1]

Could this analysis of “Television as ideology” also serve as an indictment of Kiss Me Deadly, of Aldrich and of film noir, whose traits were being imported into television to be mass-produced in crime series like Peter Gunn (USA 1958-1950)? (Scripts for Aldrich’s Dante episodes were written by Peter Gunn creator Blake Edwards.)

Not really: Adorno’s emphasis is not on the “dimestore romanticism” of the world-view purveyed in “Dante’s Inferno”, but rather on the “pseudo-realism” of television, with its “pedantic imitation of all the accessories of real life”. The ultimate consequence of the iedological operation he is denouncing would be the American public’s ongoing paranoia about crime (in the face of dwindling crime statistics and burgeoning police scandals), and the ultimate medium for “[infusing] empirical life with false meaning” by coupling “horrible acts of violence” with “pseudo-realism” would be American television’s local news programs, which dedicate most of their airtime to the local police blotter in an attempt to attract the audience that watches “reality shows” like Cops.
The way Aldrich’s masterpiece embodies the American psychosis is worlds away from the brainwashing effects of the five decades of television crime shows that have followed in the modest wake of “Dante’s Inferno”. The baroque violence of Kiss Me Deadly , its foregrounding of the stylistic traits of film noir and the mythical resonances set off by A.I. Bezzerides’ brilliant script would never lead viewers to “construe their experiences just as rigidly and mechanically” as the givens of a genre. But the confrontation of Aldrich and Adorno, like the confrontation elsewhere in this issue between Aldrich and his frequent collaborator Hugo Butler, is useful in situating an oeuvre whose best years were bordered on the left by communism (Abraham Polonsky was one of the speakers at the Director”s Guild memorial for Aldrich) and on the right by the paranoia of the Cold War era, which it both embodied and denounced with its wonderful excesses.

Footnotes:
[1] Theodor Adorno, “Television as ideology”, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. First published as “Fernsehen als Ideologie” Rundfunk und Fernsehen 4 (1953), 1-11.